The torrent-downloading site The Pirate Bay announced last week in a blog post that the Swedish authorities had launched a new criminal investigation into its activities.

"The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010," the blog said. "Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis."

Today, the torrent news site TorrentFreak confirmed that the Swedish police were looking into The Pirate Bay. Apparently, authorities requested that the Swedish hosting company Binero, where The Pirate Bay is registered, divulge the personal details of the customer who registered the site's domain name.

"We can confirm that an investigation is underway against The Pirate Bay," Binero's marketing manager, Erik Arnberg, told TorrentFreak. "We received a letter with questions."

This would be the second investigation into the site. The first investigation started in 2006 and culminated in a high-profile trial in Sweden in which four defendants were found guilty of copyright violations, sentenced to a year in jail, and ordered to pay the equivalent of $3 million.

However, within a year the site was back, but with a new bandwidth provider. Since then The Pirate Bay has taken a number of measures to protect itself. Firstly, it now uses magnet links, which lets users download from other BitTorrent users rather than keeping all torrent files on a central server.

Secondly, the site isn't hosted in a specific country. In fact, it claims to have servers all over the world. "TPB is set up in a very special way to make sure that it will stay up," its blog post said. "This means that no one really knows exactly where the servers are, but we've made sure to stay out of the United States of Arrogance and some other countries where the governments do not like free speech."

The Pirate Bay has also added several backup domains and moved to the .se domain. However, the site seems to think that moving to the .se domain is what pushed the authorities to crank their investigation up a notch.

According to TorrentFreak, Binero said it will not comply with the police requests to hand over the details of the customer who registered the domain name unless a proper warrant is served, which hasn't happened yet.

The goal of The Pirate Bay investigation is not yet clear. According to TorrentFreak, Swedish district attorney Ingblad confirmed that the government is "interested in torrent sites" but would not comment further.

As for The Pirate Bay, it signed off its blog post saying, "We're staying put where we are. We're going no-where. But we have a message to Hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL."

About the author

Dara Kerr is a staff writer for CNET focused on the sharing economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado where she developed an affinity for collecting fool's gold and spirit animals.
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